Feminist City, Leslie Kern

On creating the non-sexist city. Kern’s article in the Guardian.

society’s historical and ongoing ideas about the proper gender roles for men and women (organised along a narrow binary) are built right into our cities – and they still matter. They matter to me as a mother. They matter to me as a busy professor who often finds herself in strange cities, wondering if it’s OK to pop into the neighbourhood pub alone. Ask any woman who’s tried to bring a pram on to a bus, breastfeed in a park, or go for a jog at night. She intuitively understands the message the city sends her: this place is not for you.

Yet the city can be a place of great freedom. The anonymity of urban life breeds possibilities easily stifled in a claustrophobic small town or suburban enclave. Education, work, pleasure, politics: the city broadens our horizons and gives us choices our foremothers never had. Despite its hostilities, it remains our best hope for radical change.

Book by Verso.

Art Monsters: On Beauty and Excess

“Chatto & Windus has acquired an “explosive” non-fiction book, dubbed part cultural history, part feminist manifesto and part memoir, from The Wylie Agency.

Clara Farmer, publishing director at Chatto & Windus, has acquired, on proposal, world all-language rights to Art Monsters: On Beauty and Excess by Lauren Elkin, from Alba Ziegler- Bailey at The Wylie Agency. 

Art Monsters is an explosive reflection on the lives of creative women and the necessity of transgression. In the old days an ‘art monster’ was a man attended to by an ‘angel in the house’ so that he could concentrate solely on artistic concerns. But what happens when the angel is also an art monster herself – how do these women occupy both roles, fearlessly?” said the publisher. “Lauren Elkin’s riveting new book looks at women in culture – in art, literature, music and fashion – and how so often they are found wanting, either for failing to live up to impossible expectations, or for exceeding them so radically that they become ‘too much’. But this monstrousness can create its own power. From riot grrrl to Pussy Riot, from Louise Bourgeois to Audre Lorde, Art Monsters is a celebration of women making art that aims to provoke, that delights in all that is crass, grotesque, too big and too loud.”

Full manuscript to be delivered early 2020. US rights have been sold to FSG; German and Korean deals have also been secured. ” via thebookseller.

Susan Sontag. #art-monsters

Divola

R01F30, 1996-97
Archival digital black & white pigment print
34 x 24 inches, 64 x 44 inches
galleryluisotti.com
installation view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013 via mousse.

John Divola, “As Far as I Could Get” “As Far As I Could Get” is the first over-arching presentation of Divola’s work and is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) in the fall of 2013.

R03F03, 1996-97
Archival digital black & white pigment print
34 x 24 inches, 64 x 44 inches
R02F03, 1996-97
Archival digital black & white pigment print
34 x 24 inches, 64 x 44 inches
R02F33, 1996-97
Archival digital black & white pigment print
34 x 24 inches, 64 x 44 inches
installation view John Divola: As Far As I Could Get, 2013
officebaroque.com
installation view John Divola: As Far As I Could Get, 2013
officebaroque.com

February 2020, edition of 800, hardcover, 20x24cm, 80 pages
Designed by Federico Carpani. Text/Interview by David Campany (essay, 2006).

via skinnerboox.

Divola’s website.

Los Miamis mutables.

Legna Rodriguez Iglesias wrote about Miami, a view of its connection to the Caribbean, in relation to thought, literature, and art, and a productive use of IG. Text is publised in Rialta.

ESTOY USANDO, POR CIERTO, LA OBRA DE UN ARTISTA, COMO APOYATURA PARA SUBRAYAR, ADEMÁS, LO QUE YA OTROS HAN DEMOSTRADO: QUE UNA POÉTICA DEL CARIBE SE PODRÍA REDEFINIR DESDE LA POÉTICA DE MIAMI. UN CARIBE MÁS REDONDO, MÁS EXPLOSIVO, MÁS COMPLETO Y POR TANTO, MÁS MEJOR.

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias
Untitled (Soundings of a cultivated landscape, cocorico) ii
2017-2019. Installation of color photographs.

It is a great honor to be included and to find kinship in fellow artist.